Don't Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890by John RamsdenLittle, Brown £20, pp448

Children's books can be alarmingly revealing about national character. A 19th-century British school textbook, at a time when German culture was widely admired, advised: 'I am sure if you were a cow, you would far rather be an English cow, ranging at will over the fields, than shut up in a stable by a German farmer.' Nearly a century later, British officials in occupied Germany found the following problem in a maths textbook: 'If it takes 50,000 members of the Wehrmacht three days to conquer Holland [area given], how many days will it take 80,000 men to conquer England [areas given]?'

Even so, John Ramsden's Don't Mention the War argues that, throughout the adversarial history of the Anglo-German relationship since 1890, there has often been a countervailing sense that a meeting of minds was within reach. When, in 1965, the Queen made the first state visit to Germany since the time of the Kaiser, a German journalist wrote: 'No relations between peoples have been more deeply disturbed ... and this precisely because there was so much sympathy, so much wooing, willingness to understand, even admiration involved on both sides. The pain of disappointment corresponded to the degree of previously nurtured expectations.' The Queen was greeted by the guttural roar of the crowd - 'EL-IZ-AB-ET' - a sound that reminded the Foreign Secretary of the newsreels of a generation before.

In the 19th century, Britain and Germany had celebrated a shared Anglo-Saxon heritage. Our finest hour was at Waterloo, our national nightmare the Norman yoke of 1066. But the ceding by Britain of industrial supremacy to Germany turned admiration to fear, a defensive reflex that assumed any German success had to be to British detriment. There was also the fact that Germany was led by the most tactless, reckless and ridiculous monarch in Europe. The Kaiser, JM Barrie's model for Captain Hook, sobbed on the deathbed of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, even as he pursued a policy towards England described by Lord Salisbury as 'undisguised blackmail'.

The crassness of German diplomacy sparked a frenzy of invasion scare stories in popular literature. By 1914, the British had already fought in their imagination the war that was to become a far more terrible reality. The Great War led to the deportation of German communities from Brighton to Dundee, a vanished part of our culture. Fellow Anglo-Saxons become the Hun. A bishop claimed: 'We are the preordained instruments to save the Christian civilisation of Europe from being overrun by a brutal and ruthless paganism.'

Wartime hysteria none the less distinguished between Prussia and Germany, and it is remarkable how quickly after 1918 the British were prepared to forgive and forget. Versailles was seen as an ill-judged treaty of French vindictiveness. But the failure of appeasement led to a far more cold-eyed appraisal of the German question. Government divided as to whether this was an ideological war against Nazism or whether there was something in the German psyche itself that had to be expunged.

After the discovery of Belsen, the Political Warfare Executive concluded that 'the moral responsibility for these crimes should be laid wholly and solely at the German nation'. Though Churchill, after seeing the devastation of Berlin, claimed: 'My hate died with their surrender', Ernie Bevin was more representative when he said to General Robertson: 'I tries 'ard, Brian, but I 'ates them.' After 1945, it was the French who wanted to move on, the British who would not forget.

In his examination of the postwar relationship, Ramsden takes sides. He argues that as Britain missed the European bus and stagnated while West Germany performed its economic miracle, so victory over Nazism became our culture of consolation. Football, television and the tabloid press intensified this self-delusion as each decade passed. In the 1950s, Bert Trautmann, a former Nazi paratrooper, was signed as Manchester City's goalkeeper and became a national hero, playing on in the FA Cup final with a broken neck to receive his medal from the Queen. The World Cup Final in 1966 was played out with the shadow of 1940 across Wembley Stadium, but the atmosphere was one of good-tempered generosity and mutual respect. It was only in the Seventies and Eighties, when English football floundered in mediocrity and West Germany was the elegant team of the era, that football was dragged into our postwar sulk.

As Ramsden deftly weaves together anecdote, films, snippets of government memos and tabloid stunts, he becomes increasingly exasperated at Britain's unending Germanophobia, but perhaps he misses a point. British popular animus in the past 20 years has been directed not at Germany but against 'Europe', identified in the Bonapartist ambitions of Jacques Delors and Chirac. At European summits, Waterloo, not El Alamein, has been the tabloid metaphor. The Germans are the butt of our (rather good) jokes, but, as in Fawlty Towers, we often turn the joke against ourselves. Perhaps the best way to restore our 19th-century love of Germany is to teach our children once again about the awful Normans.